The Joyzine Advent Calendar 2025 – 24 Days of Free Music Downloads: #10

Joy to the world! It’s the return of our favourite festive tradition, the Joyzine Advent Calendar, back for its 22nd consecutive edition, which as far as we’re aware makes it the longest running on the net.

As always, every track is completely free to download and we don’t require you to sign up for a mailing list (though you can if you want to) or hand over your personal data – it’s our way of saying thank you to everyone who’s visited the site during 2025 and to hopefully bring a few more listeners to some very deserving artists.

However, if you do enjoy the tracks we would love you to consider making a donation to our chosen cause, which this year is HOPE not hate, and their stirling work researching, campaigning, and supporting communities to build HOPE and oppose far-right extremism. You can make a donation here.

What a year it’s been for Welsh triple harpist and singer (and pianist and guitarist) Cerys Hafana. Their album Angel, which mixes the traditional with the modern, has been a huge critical success and it was followed by a long tour of the UK, Ireland and Europe (see the 2026 live date at the bottom of this article). I reviewed the album, saying ‘We live in worrying times and while we need bands to shout and scream about injustice and provide a rallying cry to fight the rise of divisive politics, we also need moments when we can pause the anger and spend some time recharging our souls; to breathe in the bucolic smell of pine trees and petrichor. Cerys Hafana will guide you to those places and their playing and singing might allow you to glimpse something magical or mystical out of the corner of your eye.‘ and was also lucky to enough to them playing at St. George’s in Bristol, ‘Cerys Hafana’s melding of the traditional and modern creates exceptional music that is as enthralling live as it is on record‘.

Cerys Hafana’s contribution to the Joyzine advent calendar, ‘Y Delyn’, is the simply stunning . I appreciate that when artists put an album together they will agonise over the running order and what is included and what is left out but when I first heard ‘Y Delyn’ the word outtake can only be applied in the sense that it didn’t make the cut for the final album. As a standalone track it is breath-holdingly wonderful. Replete with rippling harp, lightly splashing drums and cymbals, long and low double bass, empathic saxophone, and Hafana’s transfixing voice. If you look up ‘spellbinding’ in an online Dictionary it should simply have a link to Cerys Hafana’s music.

We caught up with Cerys for a festive q&a session:

Tell us a little bit about your track please

“‘Y Delyn’ is an outtake from Angel. The album turned out to be much too long for vinyl, and so this piece had to get the cut. I actually wrote the song, with original words, 2 or 3 years ago, back when I first thought it would be funny to make an album called ‘Angel’. The words in this version are three verses of ‘hen benillion’ (‘old verses’), and have the same metre as the words to Helynt Ryfeddol and Angel. One of the verses also makes a reappearance right at the end of the album, to a different tune. The title means ‘The Harp’, and each verse is about death, or disappearance, but in a poetic rather than bleak way. Merry Christmas!“

What have you been up to in 2025?

It’s been a bit of a hectic year (I say that every year but I think this year wins). Did lots of gigs, from churches to underground reservoirs to jazz bars to vineyards, and from Bethesda to Oslo to Aldershot to Germany’s smallest town (not in that order). Released two albums and did some exciting commissions (including the music for a National Dance Company Wales production, in which I got to live out my creepy droney synthy folk dance dreams).

And what are your plans for next year?

My plan is to be less hectic but that never seems to work out. I have some exciting gigs booked in, but am also hoping for a little bit more breathing space to follow some creative endeavours that have been knocking around my head for a while. I say this at the end of every year and one day it will happen: I want to play a pipe organ.

What have been your musical highlights of the year from other bands/artists?

Watching Lisa O’Neill at Moseley Folk Festival back in August and crying; finally getting to see my friend Quinquis perform live in London supporting Gwenno; Hidden Notes festival in Stroud (specifically getting to see Mario Batkovic, my favourite accordion player, performing live after many years of listening to his albums, and having an almost out-of-body experience in the church listening to Melos Kalpa whilst very tired and sleep deprived).

Christmas: The most wonderful time of the year or a big bag of humbug?

I’m very neutral about Christmas, although we do seem to be channelling Scrooge this year and haven’t put any decorations up at all yet. It’s too warm!

Stream and download ‘Y Delyn’ below